Posted by ogi on December 18, 2009 at 8:11am
8 followers
Issue Summary
Seven theme uses the following font preferences:
font-family: Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans Unicode, sans-serif;
On my system Lucida Sans Unicode selects Lucida Bright which is serif font and looks ugly due to lack of hinting. The only Lucida fonts on my system (Debian 5.0 Lenny) are those installed by sun java: Lucida Bright and Lucida Sans.
When I replace Lucida Sans Unicode with Lucida Sans (or Lucida), Lucida Sans is selected and it looks as expected, that is, great.
Please change font-family in such a way so that Lucida Bright is not selected by fontconfig. Seven is default admin theme and install theme, so I think it's important this to be fixed.
Comments
#1
It turns out that just adding
Lucida Sansexplicitly solves the issue.#2
Curious to see a screenshot (but not required).
#3
Screenshots are attached for before and after applying the patch. The combination of low dpi, small size, serif font and no hinting is what makes this professional font look ugly. I took the opportunity to demonstrate (in after patch screenshoot d7-lucida-sans.png) that Java's Lucida Sans doesn't have italics, so system default sans-serif is used for italics (DejaVu Sans) - it looks like bold italics compared to Lucida Sans but it's regular italics.
As I see it, Lucida Grande is Mac font, Lucida Sans Unicode is Windows font, so the natural choice for Linux would be DejaVu Sans because it's installed by default practically on all Linux distributions.
#4
The last submitted patch failed testing.
#5
Like to hear some more feedback on this, seems like a very easy fix. We have a lot of linux users and no real complaints from them over the past year, although offline I have heard gripes regarding Sevens font stack.
#6
Basically just a re-roll.
#7
I've got Lucida Sans installed, which is pretty common on a Linux system as part of the Java package. But DejaVu Sans is default and even more common, according to http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-UnixResults.shtml
But Lucida Sans is also fairly common on Windows/Mac, so to target Linux specifically and provide additional fallback for other systems, I would vote to add DejaVu Sans to the stack just ahead of Lucida Sans.
#8
Cross-post. Adding a completely new font is up to Jeff.
#9
Well I think stephthegeek knows a lot more about fonts that I ever will :)
I take it the proposal is to do this:
"Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "DejaVu Sans", "Lucida Sans", sans-serif;I've added some screen shots to show each font and the subtle differences. Obviously on my system Lucida Grande gets selected although even then in IE9 with the full stack the kerning gets ever so slightly adjusted, which is kind of weird.
Frankly I'm a big fan of Bitstream fonts and would not be opposed to adding DejaVu Sans to the stack.
FWIW I am just one lone voice in the cacophony - my job is more about managing this queue, reviewing patches etc, the real decisions are made by everyone.
#10
Bah, ignore those screens, try these ones, those grabbed my other screen as well and are huge, sorry.
#11
Read that as a feature request, I'm in that sort of mode.
I agree with this, it looks good.
#12
Still ugly in Linux.
#13
#14
Needs a reroll because of the new directory structure.
#15
The problem that I'm seeing is that, because Lucida Sans Unicode is before Lucida Sans, Linux is still matching it to Lucida Bright for whatever reason. Is there a particular reason why Lucida Sans Unicode is preferred over Lucida Sans, or could Lucida Sans go in front of it?
#16
The first patch is just the latest patch rerolled for the new directory structure. The second patch reorders the list of fonts to be "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans", "Lucida Sans Unicode" since ogi said the problem still existed with them ordered with Lucida Sans at the end.
I'm not sure which one would be more appropriate, but they were both easy enough to do that I figured it wouldn't hurt to leave them here for someone else to make the decision on.